Among the contents of Swinburne's Poems and Ballads, 1866, few pieces aroused more hostility than The Leper. John Morley and Robert Buchanan, it is true, ignored that poem in their damaging critical notices in The Saturday Review and The Athenæum for August 4, nor did Swinburne mention it in Notes on Poems and Reviews. But The Spectator of September 22, discussing the question of immorality in literature, after citing Swinburne's Faustine as a poem in which artistic treatment justifies the subject, added: “It is entirely otherwise with his Anactoria and Phaedra, and other foul stuff, worst of all, The Leper, which we think no critics can speak worse of than they deserve.” An article in Fraser's Magazine for November, though predominantly favorable to Poems and Ballads, named The Leper among the poems that should be suppressed. The Athenæum for November 3, in a criticism of Notes on Poems and Reviews, remarked: “To our thinking, nothing can be more horribly impure, more utterly loathsome, than the story of the unclean priest [sic] and his leprous mistress [sic].” The Westminster Review for April 1, 1867, mentioned Laus Veneris, The Leper, and Les Noyades as the chief objects of popular clamor.

By no means the least factors in the unity and critical effectiveness of The National Observer and The New Review, the magazines edited by W. E. Henley, were the conscious and definite canons by which they were guided. Although he never formulated an æsthetic system, Henley nevertheless worked and judged in accordance with several clearly perceived principles, the exposition of which is our immediate task.

The region inhabited by the Southern Highlanders has been called the Southern Mountains, Appalachian America, Elizabethan America, Shakespearian America, and so on. Its inhabitants have been referred to as “our contemporary ancestors.” The language of these people has been labeled Old English, Early English, Elizabethan English, Scottish, Irish, Scotch-Irish. Roughly speaking, the region extends from Maryland to northern Alabama, including parts of Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama. Its area is about that of the British Isles, and its population around five millions. Our study can not therefore be complete or exhaustive. The investigation is made more difficult by the fact that the highlander's language varies in different sections of the highlands, and frequently even in the same community. In West Virginia and in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia numerous Scottish survivals are found; further south they are not common. Thus one meets with different types of dialect in the novels of Charles Egbert Craddock, for Tennessee, Will N. Harben, for Georgia, John Fox, Jr., for Kentucky and Virginia, and Lucy Furman, for Kentucky. The language of Percy McKaye's plays is in no way similar to that of any section of the Southern highlands. The linguistic peculiarities noted in this study have been picked up here and there over the highland section during the past twenty years; as a high-lander from Kentucky, I had heard many of them myself from childhood.

For the record of business transacted at the business meeting of the Executive Council at Washington, December 31, 1930, see the Proceedings as printed in the Supplement to PMLAxlv, page lxiii.